Today's development in information technology and communication services is moving from local services to shared services. Such shared services may start from sharing the same data center with high security facilities, cooling, redundant electricity supply and redundant bandwidth. Shared services may range over shared computer hardware, shared operating systems, all the way to shared computing power distributed over a number of physical computers. There are a number of similar terms for shared services, such as hosted services, virtualized servers, virtualized computing, networked computing, clouds, computer clouds and cloud computing, not limiting to similar terms.
Centrally located resources, or resources distributed to different continents around the globe linked together such that they form a common pool of resources, are typically beneficial from a cost perspective. A few examples of resources which may be suitable to share for the purpose to save costs are; back-up diesel generators, doubled communication links provided from separated and different physical directions, hardware computer equipment, single point for software maintenance and updates of one system, instead of potentially many systems to maintain.
There are a number of benefits of sharing resources and loosen the relation between software based services and computer hardware. It provides cost efficient solutions, flexibility for service providers who do not have to worry about the burden of computer hardware.
However, the trend to move services higher and higher up in the network architecture and sometimes also longer away in physical distance may cause problems. An increasing problem of today may be the fact that the communications networks are highly utilized and therefore cannot handle expected large increases of data traffic without significant investments. Sometimes it might be acceptable that signaling may be carried over long distances, because the signaling only requires limited bandwidth, but the following traffic related to the signaling may less desired to carry longer than necessary. Sometimes the signaling itself would benefit of a shorter path, because in a situation with many router hops and high network load, latency and jitter may affect service performance.
Further is more and more type of mass media, such as newspapers and broadcast type of services moving into the communications networks. An effect of that is that the load on the communications network increases, with a mix of common content as well as highly personalized content. News content may be more or less common, but advertising may be rather personalized, or at least not directly associated with the news content or originating from the same source as the news content.